The present invention relates generally to media display systems, and, more particularly, to a display system for displaying a media stream based on a random access point.
In some video applications in favor of uniform (even) channel bandwidth utilization, intra-refresh encoding is more preferable than conventional periodic key frame encoding. However, for bitstream encoding using intra-refresh, it is more difficult to achieve random access due to a lack of key frames. FIG. 1 shows a conventional bitstream 100 including a plurality of frames 102 encoded using an intra-refresh scheme. Decoding a certain frame 102a indicated by a given random access point requires information in reference frames 102b that have been previously decoded. As shown in FIG. 2, which illustrates the frame 102 in the bitstream 100 that is formed with a plurality of macro blocks (MBs) 104, the MBs 104 include intra-MBs 106 that are decoded based on information in the current frame, and inter-MBs 108 that are decoded based on information in previously decoded reference frames. Therefore, the frame 102 at the given random access point cannot be reconstructed correctly because the reference frames based on which the inter-MBs 108 in the frame 102 are decoded are skipped, which brings unpleasant mosaics when displaying frames right after the random access point until more frames 102 are gradually decoded. Therefore, it would be beneficial to determine a frame with satisfactory visual quality after the random access point and start to display the bitstream from the determined frame to improve the user experience.